Unlike the CALL command, which enables you to call WebFOCUS Maintain functions as RPCs, the EXEC command enables you to call FOCEXECs from Maintain. A Maintain procedure can execute any FOCEXEC that returns either a structured answer set or HTML. The data the FOCEXEC returns can easily be received back into a stack in the calling Maintain procedure.

Since an EXECed procedure is a FOCEXEC and not a Maintain procedure, please note these differences between the CALL and EXEC commands:

• You cannot send an EXEC procedure a Maintain stack as a parameter. Only scalar parameters are permitted. The FOCEXEC treats them like amper variables.

  Note: To pass stack members to a FOCEXEC, copy the stack members to scalar variables and pass them as scalars.

• When on the same server, CALL runs on the same server agent, while EXEC starts a new server agent. When run remotely, CALL and EXEC both start new agents.
• The answer set returned by EXEC does not have to include the full logical database path to the column(s) you requested, as does CALL. This enables you to get only the column(s) you want without having a wider stack than is necessary, as is often the case with Maintain calls.